Hello! I'm Niklas Roy, an inventor of useless things. As you can find a lot of information about what I do on the left - I think I don't need to write too much about myself here.
The installation opened last week and will be running for the next half year. This time, the pneumatic track is roughly 70 meters long. It goes from the entrance hall, through the staircase into the first floor, where it passes the institute’s library, then it makes its way back to the ground floor. The balls race through the entire pipe system within 11 seconds, which makes them in average 22.91 km/h fast (The video above is in slow motion). That’s stunning to watch and fun to play with.
Give it a visit when you’re in Prague!
My latest machine, the “Pneumatic Sponge Ball Accelerator” is currently installed at the Tschumi Pavilion in Groningen. You can visit it until the end of September.
This week on Thursday, 6PM, the project ‘Spieltrieb – the play in art, science and society’ will be kicked off at Goethe Institut Kraków. The project includes a one year exhibition of my new installation “Suck the Balls!” right at the Potocki Palace at Kraków’s main square (which is actually the Goethe Kraków headquarter).
The construction consists of a little ball pit, a vacuum cleaner powered pneumatic tube transport and a ball shower.
Before I went to Kraków last week to set up the machine in the beautiful historic staircase of the palace, I asked my friend and technology aficionado Günter Schulz to come over to my workshop for some beta testing.
For further video analysis, I filmed Günter executing various performance tests.
Please analyze yourself:
Huh, it really has been a while since I updated my website! But here is finally the video of the installation which I made together with the Polish artist group panGenerator. Our idea was to create a digital data storage device with unclear capacity: If you fill it up too much with data, it will explode.
Data can be entered with a keyboard. Each letter which is entered into the balloon is also spoken out loud. And you can release previeously stored data again by hitting backspace. That will spell out old information and deflate the balloon.
The installation was built within a week, so there was not much time for testing. And at the end it turned out that it is rather hard to let the balloon explode. Such a balloon can really store quite a large amount of data :) And that’s also the reason why there’s no explosion to see in the otherwise really beautiful video :(
The National Audiovisual Institute of Poland invited me and the artist collective panGenerator to make a new installation. We called it “Explosive Digital Data Storage”. You can see it (and try it out) at Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw for the next two weeks. Below is a picture of the opening and soon, I’ll publish a documentation.
